The present invention pertains to teleconferencing arrangements and more particularly to conference call bridges in a voice over internet protocol environment.
Special telephony functions are provided by telephone operating companies or by teleconference facilitator companies. These companies provide the special service of teleconference facilitating by interconnecting three or more conference users in one common telephone call. As a result, each of the users is able to talk and to hear each of the other users. The number of total teleconference users may be quite high. In the internet protocol environment, bandwidths are typically very large compared to basic voice telephony. Voice data becomes almost incidental to the large packets of data carried on the internet. Therefore, voice over internet protocol (VOIP) enables the internet system to carry telephone traffic which typically requires far less data to be exchanged via the internet than does data packages of information.
Telephone operating companies or teleconference facilitator companies typically implement a teleconference arrangement by a conference bridge. This conference bridge includes a bank of varied codecs, converters, mixers and vocoders. Each particular user has a codec in his teleconference terminal and must be connected with a similar codec at the conference bridge arrangement in the teleconference facilitator's equipment. The conference users may have different and varied codecs, therefore the conference bridge must be capable of serving many different kinds of codec interfaces. In addition, this conference bridge must perform conversions of the voice data from one codec to another; mix the various voice signals together and then revocode them for distribution to each of the conference users. Such teleconference bridge arrangements require much real time voice processing computing engines to perform these functions and a varied array of equipment to support the various codecs conference users might have and must dedicate much of this equipment to each particular conference call.
What is needed is a means for simply facilitating conference call bridging in a voice over internet protocol environment. Further what is needed is a conference call bridge arrangement which may be controlled by a teleconference terminal, possible a remote.